Oasis on the Big Screen: Don't Look Back in Anger Arrives in Cinemas

A year after the reunion that was never supposed to happen, Oasis have arrived in cinemas. Oasis: Don't Look Back In Anger opened in select IMAX screens and cinemas on Wednesday, carrying with it the dust of forty one stadium nights and the first joint interviews with Noel and Liam Gallagher in more than twenty years.

The film, created by Steven Knight, the writer behind Peaky Blinders, and directed by Dylan Southern and Will Lovelace, received its world premiere at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, an unlikely setting for a band whose natural habitat has always been the football end rather than the red carpet. The Lido, by all accounts, embraced them.

What the directors have assembled is less a conventional rock documentary than a record of a national event. The cameras were given rehearsal, backstage and onstage access across the 2025 tour of 41 dates, and the result charts not simply how the shows were built but what they meant: the queues, the bucket hats, the singalongs that began hours before the band walked on.

Knight's involvement is itself a statement of intent. The man who turned the Shelby family into a global export has spent his career finding the myth inside working class stories, and the Gallaghers, two sons of Irish immigrants from Burnage who became the biggest band in the world, offer him the richest material he has handled.

The brothers, in the same room

The film's coup is the interview footage. Noel and Liam, whose feud sustained two decades of tabloid headlines, sat for their first joint interviews in over twenty years. The truce that made the tour possible is examined with a delicacy that fans will find moving and sceptics may find forgiving, but the sight of the brothers in conversation is the film's reason to exist.

Southern and Lovelace have spoken of the opening night at Cardiff's Principality Stadium as a hugely emotional occasion, describing Noel as surprised by the scale of the response. The cameras catch him, more than once, simply shaking his head at the noise. The directors noted, too, the composition of the crowds: three generations of families, grandparents beside teenagers, all singing the same words. That image is the film's quiet thesis. Oasis in 2025 were not a nostalgia act; they were an inheritance being handed down.

Why the reunion mattered

Culturally, the tour settled an argument. The reunion shows became the fastest selling in British history and turned provincial stadiums into places of pilgrimage, proof that guitar music, written off for years as a heritage genre, could still command the centre of the culture when the songs were big enough. At a moment when the charts are dominated by solo artists and algorithms, the sight of 70,000 people singing in unison felt almost defiant.

The film understands that the reunion was never really about the music industry. It was about memory, about a version of Britain that believed in itself loudly, and about two brothers from Manchester whose falling out and making up played out like a national soap opera. There is a reason the reunion resonated beyond the band's original audience: the songs were already embedded in weddings, funerals and football terraces, waiting to be reactivated. The cinema release simply gives that inheritance the screen it always deserved.

For those who missed the tickets, and there were millions, the film is the next best seat in the house. It streams on Disney+ in the UK and Ireland later this year. Expect the singalong screenings, already selling out in Manchester and Glasgow, to run well into the autumn. Until then, the cinemas will do the singing.